Iraq has urged a US-led military coalition to use increased air power to protect the country's antiquities from Islamic State fighters looting and destroying some of the world's greatest archaeological treasures.

A government minister says the coalition, which has carried out 2,800 air strikes against IS positions in Iraq and Syria since August, is not doing enough to save Iraq's priceless heritage.

Archaeologists have compared the assault on Iraq's cultural history to the Taliban's destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas in 2001.

But the damage wreaked by IS in Iraq, where agriculture and writing were pioneered by ancient Mesopotamian civilisations, may have been more devastating.

The video also showed damage to a huge statue of a bull at the Nergal Gate into the city of Nineveh.

"Their [IS] battle is a battle for identity, to empty the region, primarily Iraq, of its human inheritance," Mr Shirshab said at a conference to mark plans for the city of Babylon to be listed as a world heritage site.

Babylon would join four other Iraqi sites: Hatra, Samarra, the Erbil citadel and Ashur, the first capital of the Assyrian empire.